Laith McGregor – Archipelago

Following on from his epic 2016 book for Perimeter Editions, S-O-M-E-O-N-E, Laith McGregor’s latest publication forges a somewhat unlikely dialogue between the artist’s often divergent processes and aesthetic outcomes. Drawing on two very different but interlinked bodies of work – McGregor’s long-running Island Drawings and more recent Island Collages – the book juxtaposes the Australian artist’s meticulously rendered, monochromatic drawings with his spontaneous, colour-rich and playfully formal collages.

Made in close collaboration with the artist – and published to coincide with a major exhibition at STATION Sydney, in late 2019 – Archipelago skirts a line between artist book and monograph, wrangling McGregor’s works in a loose, intuitive fashion, all the while affording them the critical attention they demand. Featuring an incisive text by prominent Brisbane-based curator and writer Hamish Sawyer, the book sees McGregor continue his at once lively, conceptual, idiosyncratic and methodical explorations of a wider premise that broaches travel, diarism, exoticism, representations of the Pacific and expanded notions of the portrait.

Like much of McGregor’s work, Archipelago feels measured and precise one moment, easy and breezy the next.